Head-initial and head-Final coordinate structures in two annotation schemes of dependency grammar

Timothy John Osborne, Chenchen Song


Abstract
The Universal Dependencies (UD) and Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) annotation schemes view coordinate structures as head-initial. This contribution argues that a more flexible approach to coordinate structures is linguistically motivated, one that sees coordinate structures as head-initial in greater head-initial structures and as head-final in greater head-final structures. Support for this flexible approach comes from two areas: dependency distance and a nearness effect. In addition, two arguments that have been produced supporting the strictly head-initial approach are examined and refuted.
Anthology ID:
2025.depling-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Editors:
Eva Hajičová, Sylvain Kahane
Venues:
DepLing | WS | SyntaxFest
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
74–83
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.depling-1.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Timothy John Osborne and Chenchen Song. 2025. Head-initial and head-Final coordinate structures in two annotation schemes of dependency grammar. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025), pages 74–83, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Head-initial and head-Final coordinate structures in two annotation schemes of dependency grammar (Osborne & Song, DepLing-SyntaxFest 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.depling-1.6.pdf